Top all-time · #4188
Healthchecks.io Blog
Company blog · blog.healthchecks.ioprogrammingsystems
Healthchecks.io Blog is the company blog at blog.healthchecks.io, writing about programming and systems. Since 2018, 18 different Hacker News readers have linked it 31 times, most often “Notes on Self-Hosted Transactional Email”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-13, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (8) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this blog for write-ups by a one-person SaaS author on the stack behind the service, self-hosting email and SMTP, and IP warm-up. Commenters mostly cite the posts as background.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 8 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
The Joy of Building a Cron Monitoring Service
Most-linked posts?
- Notes on Self-Hosted Transactional Email6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2023-08-09
- What One-person SaaS Healthchecks.io uses for hosting, hardware and software3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2022-02-16
- About Tracking Cookies on Status.healthchecks.io3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2020-09-24
- Throughput Upgrade (With Train Illustrations)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-07-24
- Post-mortem: Database Outage on April 30, 20252 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-05-05
What Hacker News says?
> Building an api with api-gateway + lambda (...) is guaranteed to be more cost-effective for unpredicted load. Depends on the use case. I run a cron monitoring service on a similar nginx/uwsgi/django/postgres stack [1]. My service needs to handle lots of really small and simple HTTP requests, and almost every request needs to do a (small and quick) database write. I did napkin math – at the current usage levels, La…
Comment linking /2019/08/a-look-at-healthchecks-io-hosting-setup-summer-2019/
on “The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)”- km · 2024-07-29
Submitted One-man SaaS, 9 Years In as a story · 828 points
HN discussion Further here ( https://blog.healthchecks.io/2022/02/healthchecks-io-hosting... ) it says no auto fail over.
Comment linking /2022/02/healthchecks-io-hosting-setup-2022-edition/
on “One-man SaaS, 9 Years In”Submitted What One-person SaaS Healthchecks.io uses for hosting, hardware and software as a story · 373 points
HN discussionThe notes on self-hosting[1], from somebody making $14k/month relying on Maddy, says it pretty realistically. The author goes into a fair amount of detail covering what he did and it sounds pretty simple compared to what it was ten years ago. I'm not sure zealotry is the best way to push back against conventional wisdom, but otoh the parent comment didn't sound zealous to me. In fact the more I read about Maddy[2] t…
Comment linking /2023/08/notes-on-self-hosted-transactional-email/
on “One-man SaaS, 9 Years In”Submitted Schedule cronjob for the first Monday of every month, the funky way as a story · 125 points
HN discussionThe linked email story was also interesting: https://blog.healthchecks.io/2023/08/notes-on-self-hosted-tr... The author's end solution goes against all common HN wisdom (!) This is the way things should work. There should be millions of email senders and receivers, not just 32 mafiosas (Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, MailChimp, etc). There are endless counter-examples on HN advocating against hosting something as simple as…
Comment linking /2023/08/notes-on-self-hosted-transactional-email/
on “One-man SaaS, 9 Years In”Submitted How Debian cron handles DST transitions as a story · 87 points
HN discussionAtlassian Statuspage used to set tracking cookies on their customer status pages. Of course me as a single customer asking to remove the tracking cookies had minimal if any effect. So I crawled a list of Atlassian Statuspage customers, contacted them asking to also open support tickets. And indeed it worked, the tracking cookies got removed :-) My writeup about this "project": https://blog.healthchecks.io/2020/09/ab…
Comment linking /2020/09/about-tracking-cookies-on-status-healthchecks-io/
on “A little trick to spam the spammers (2021)”Submitted Healthchecks.io Now Uses Self-Hosted Object Storage as a story · 18 points
HN discussionIt could very well be that your specific Javascript does not run automatically or does not run correctly. I see the same with one of our auto-submitting forms. I do not know whether or not that is intentional on Microsoft's part. But other users have had different experiencies, so be aware that Microsoft may 'fix' their issue on some day and all of a sudden all your users will start clicking/unsubscribing/whateverin…
Comment linking /2019/12/preventing-office-365-atp-from-clicking-unsubscribe-links/
on “Gmail is opening and caching URLs within emails without user intervention (2019)”Submitted We Moved Some Data to S3 as a story · 9 points
HN discussionJust 4 years ago, I was recommending Postmark to everyone who faced deliverability issues with sendgrid. Who's the relatively better provider now? Edit: A useful article about IP Warm up https://blog.healthchecks.io/2023/08/notes-on-self-hosted-tr...
Comment linking /2023/08/notes-on-self-hosted-transactional-email/
on “Postcard is now open source”Submitted About Tracking Cookies on Status.healthchecks.io as a story · 5 points
HN discussionI am running my own SMTP for my SaaS. I used managed SMTP services, including SES, before. It took be roughly 2 months to get it all set up: research the SMTP server options, trial a few of them, pick one, learn it thoroughly, write deployment scripts, deploy it, switch email traffic over to it gradually to warm up the sending IP, and monitor it. Blogged about it here: https://blog.healthchecks.io/2023/08/notes-on-s…
Comment linking /2023/08/notes-on-self-hosted-transactional-email/
on “Help Needed: Programmatic Email Creation and Management with Custom SMTP Server”Submitted Throughput Upgrade (With Train Illustrations) as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Notes on Self-Hosted Transactional Email as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted An unsolved database latency issue of a 1-man Ops team as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Investigating Gmail’s “This message seems dangerous” (Solved) as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Post-mortem: Database Outage on April 30, 2025 as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Comparison of Cron Monitoring Services (November 2023) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Notes on Self-Hosted Transactional Email as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted How Healthchecks Sends Signal Notifications as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Healthchecks.io Hosting Setup, 2022 Edition as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Tracking Cookies on Statuspage.io Removed as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted A Look at Healthchecks.io Hosting Setup, Summer 2019 as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Monitoring My Ingress Sojourner Medal Using Healthchecks.io as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Throughput Upgrade (With Train Illustrations) Blog as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Post-mortem: Database Outage on April 30, 2025 as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted I Found a Vulnerability in Croniter as a story · 1 points
HN discussion